[Kate Moser]
In light of the ongoing San Francisco crime lab scandal, it looks like the government doesn’t mind killing some time in the sentencing phase (free reg. req.) of a triple homicide gang case.
In a court filing today (.pdf), federal prosecutors proposed delaying sentencing in the case of Dennis Cyrus Jr. Last week, his attorneys, John Philipsborn and James Thomson, asked Judge Maxine Chesney to hold off on sentencing him while they get more information on Deborah Madden, a longtime crime lab employee who allegedly took drugs from evidence samples. Madden testified at the Cyrus trial.
The prosecutors tried to undercut the notion that the Madden evidence touches all of the convictions – an implicit acknowledgment that the drug lab problems could be troublesome for some of the 16 convictions.
“Some of these convictions, such as the witness murder of Ray Jimmerson, Jr., do not even arguably implicate the SFPD Drug Laboratory,” they wrote in their motion.
The prosecutors also noted that Madden testified only to report the weight of a plastic baggie tested by a different criminalist, and that at least six current and former SFPD drug lab criminalists other than Madden testified at trial.
Still, the government emphasized that the drug lab “issues” raised by the defense “cast no doubt on any of Cyrus’s multiple federal convictions.”
Why the fck are they postponing?
Posted by: medieval dress | April 07, 2010 at 09:34 AM